


De Dextella Dei

by Misaya



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Priests, Alternate Universe - Succubi & Incubi, Asexual Levi (Shingeki no Kyojin), Asexuality, Churches & Cathedrals, Eventual Levi/Erwin Smith, Falling In Love, Heaven, Incubus Levi, M/M, Priest Erwin Smith, Reincarnation, Religion, Religious Discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-04-15 11:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 16,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4604739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Father Erwin Smith is convinced he's starting to recede to childhood habits of night terrors and sleep paralysis again. How can there be any other explanation? God always protects the faithful.</p><p>priest!Erwin x ace incubus!Levi, inspired by a Tumblr anon prompt</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Genesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Peach_oniisan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peach_oniisan/gifts).



The first time Levi comes to him, Father Erwin Smith, priest and holy servant of the Lord, has just finished looking over his sermon for Sunday mass. Taking care not to blot the fine onion-skin pages in front of him, covered margin to margin with long-sloping cursive that's stained the side of his right hand, he caps his fountain pen with a satisfied sigh, secure in the weighty assuredness of the presence of the parishioners that will fill tomorrow's pews. They will enter, broken birds weighed down by the albatrosses of their worldliness. They will exit, buoyed with confessions and communions, to discover that they can fly again. 

The table lamp on his oaken desk glimmers soft gold across the room, weaving light fingers through his hair and dancing cantatas across the planes of his cheekbones as he stands up to ready himself for bed. His shadow stretches long across the bedroom as he pads over to the armchair in the corner where he's laid out his vestments for the coming day. He picks a near invisible ball of lint from a stiff cotton shoulder, rolling it soft and thready between his fingers. Cassock, collar, clerical clothing laid out neat and ready to accept the holy vessel of Christ, and erwin straightens the fabric out again for what feels like the tenth time, reveling in the way the starched material feels against the pads of his fingertips. 

The first time Levi comes to him, Father Erwin Smith, priest of St. Anne of the Sunset Church, has the taste of mint toothpaste in his mouth. His teeth are glossy clean against his tongue as he mouths his bedtime prayer, thanking the Lord for the graces and favors that have been bestowed upon him this lovely Saturday in the middle of January. He asks the Lord to allow the holy angels to stand about his bedside to protect him from sin, and, with his eyes closed tight and his forehead tucked against the join of his hands, he does not see the way the light from the desk lamp across the room flickers, wavering across the burnished gold of his hair. 

He stands up, the Amen tucked into the corner of his cheek like a butterscotch candy, releasing its benediction a sweet flavor, reassuring and steady, the taste of faith in a broken world. 

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned." He will hear it tomorrow, will hear the phrase for the rest of his life, the words slick sibilant syllables driven to excess, delivered in spades. He will fold his hands neatly, delicately, in his lap, breathing in the heady scents of incense and candle wax, and he will deliver absolution through the latticed slats of the confessional. A Hail Mary here, full of grace, an Our Father who Art in Heaven there. Whitewashes against the black backdrops of sin, and ink dissolves into milk, a cycle. And, like Atlas, he spends hours in the confessional, late afternoon sunshine through the stained glass of the chapel painting his face with rainbows, and bleaches away time and again the darkness that threatens to encroach on the sacrament of the blessed. 

He pads over to the desk, reaching out to click off the desk lamp. It scatters gold filaments across the text of his sermon, a holy nova of words, bittersweet alchemy of transforming sinners into saints. He runs a finger lovingly over the indented scrawls on the pages, kisses the blots of ink that leave faint streaks over the pad of his fingertip as he mouths the scripture to himself, just one last time. Vanity, veritas, mingling together on the page, and he can imagine the parishioners looking up at him with tears in their eyes. It's almost intoxicating, and Erwin has to remind himself very firmly that the power of judgment is not his to bestow. 

A mere vessel, he scolds himself sternly as he clicks the light off, darkness sweeping inky tendrils across the bedroom. He fumbles his way to the bed, one step, two, dimly lit with the orange glow from the street lamps outside. The comforters are reassuringly, almost endearingly, scratchy against his bare skin as he slips between them, shivering in the winter chill, goosebumps dotting the flesh of the image of God making bodily lumps beneath the blankets. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath that makes his lungs ache with the cold, and waits for dreams to come carry him away. 

They reach out, gossamer inky strands of memory, tugging him into slumber, and the first time Levi comes to him, he is already caught halfway between this world and the next, tangled in the silky shroud of sleep so that Levi's pale figure is just a soft blur in the growing gloam. He comes out of the corner where the armchair is, untangling itself from the folds of the clothing of the clergy, and milky skin blots out the orange light seeping through the window. Erwin's voice catches in his throat, a plea for help, a cry for salvation lost somewhere halfway between his mind and his mouth. He tries to curl his hands into fists at his sides, tries to prop himself up on his elbows to reach out for the crucifix hanging solid and wooden over the headboard, but his body refuses to obey, caught in paralysis at the devastating beauty of the demon who stands patiently at the side of his bed. 

Incubus. The word comes quick to Erwin's half-awake mind, sexuality in Christian demonology, and he half-remembers late nights spent in the canonical libraries, poring over texts so fragile that they crumbled yellowing in his palm at the slightest rough exhalation. It lodges itself firmly into his brain, growing inky roots. The holy texts and the sermon for tomorrow's Mass sit heavy on his desk, but the demon takes no note of them, meaningless words on parchment. A sham, a scandal, a charlatan. Erwin aches to pray for mercy, the Latin words of exorcism and safeguarding slippery in his head, dancing butterflies through a net without a bottom. 

The demon kneels, ink swirling into milk, resting his pale arms on the bed, the mattress barely dipping underneath the pressure. He rests his chin on his crossed wrists, examining Erwin with a curiosity that is bittersweet and frightening in its sheer humanity. He reaches out a slender finger, candle wax in the gloam, to brush over Erwin's lips, and it is all Erwin can do to stutter a gasp through parted flesh. The chill pervades him and threatens to suffocate him with its sensuality. 

"You know what I am." The incubus speaks, soft sibilant syllables that stroke their way through Erwin's mind, painting themselves with the silk of sleep. It is a statement, not a question. "Don't you, Father?" 

Erwin cannot bring himself to look away as the incubus takes back his hand, pressing kisses to his fingertips. He can almost feel the lingering chill against his lips, and, for the vaguest of moments, a fleeting thought not of his own consideration slips through his mind, asking what it might be like to kiss, to be blessed again. 

A grin, fleeting thin and crooked, across his face as he stands again, inky shadows across the planes of Erwin's cheekbones. He leans forward, and Erwin frantically tries to close his eyes, but his eyelids refuse to obey, drying and cracked wide open to accept full realization of his corruption, bittersweet alchemy of tarnish. 

A kiss. Feathered lightly across his forehead, almost mocking in its tenderness and illusion of fragility. The chill weights Erwin's eyes closed, chapped flesh against his skin. 

"Good night, Father. Sleep well." A chuckle, a hissing laugh fading away into the recesses of his mind.

The first time Levi comes to him, Father Erwin Smith wakes up the next morning with a migraine blossoming at the base of his skull. He winces in the early morning sunlight streaming in through his bedroom window, the chapel bells playing a serenade to compete with the mourning doves roosting in the eaves of the rectory. Once his eyes have adjusted to the sudden brightness, he looks around the bedroom to find that the pages of his sermon have been scattered everywhere, soft meaningless cursive into soft meaningless words.


	2. Exodus

He tries to ignore it. His fingers shake as he smooths out the onionskin pages of the sermon on the polished mahogany wood of the pulpit, gleaming and freshly waxed so that when he looks down he can see the vague outline of himself, but a man. Surely it was a dream, one to be cast out and watered down like the rich colors of lilies blossoming in the water, to escape through the infinitesimal crevices between his fingers. Surely there must have been a logical explanation for the whole thing, the pages scattered, a maelstrom, a tempest, a hurricane across his room.

An irate wind, blowing frantically through the cracks of the house, gusts from the bay screaming to be heard above the distraction of the world. An earthquake, to shake at the foundations of the buildings as if to remind them that all that grew must one day fall, sinking back into the sea and crumbling into stardust.

The first parishioners are spilling in, outside voices hushing slowly as they step into the chapel. They take off their hats, dressed all finely in their Sunday best, trying to impress the Lord. The painted light from the stained glass windows filters through their hair, coloring them into glorious angels of mercy, dipping them in holiness and benediction.

Smiles. Shy little waves. The soft scuffling of rubber-soled shoes on the tiled floors as they shuffle into the pews, wood seats comfortable and shaped from the heft of their burdens. The Bibles tucked into the backs of the seats are thumbed through, some spines cracking, pages yellowing from age, well-worn and well-loved. Erwin’s been meaning to replace them, but then he’ll sit down for a moment, one of the churchgoers, fading into the background, and he’ll open one, its weight resting comfortable and trusting in the cradle of his palm.

The familiar, tangible feeling of faith in his hands. It’s one he can’t bear himself to replace, with Bibles with spines still new and lacquered, books that don’t have dog-eared pages and teardrops marring the headers of some verses where a reader was particularly struck by the impact of his or her repressed emotions. The books tucked into the backs of the pews have character, and Erwin always stays the replacements another prayer, another week, another year.

The air inside the church is chilly, held cold in his lungs as he takes a deep breath, rubbing his hands together. Sermon isn’t due to start for another fifteen minutes, and already the pews at the front are filled.

His eyes rove over the familiar faces, smiling preliminary blessings and welcoming the returners back to the welcoming arms of the church. He asks them how they are doing, how their weeks have been, establishing contact and connection. Shakes his head and laughs at the antics of children, squirming and chattering in their seats, unable to keep fidgeting limbs still under the stern eyes of their parents. He reassures them that the Sunday school teacher will be along shortly, armed with stickers and children’s hymnals, and they quiet, looking up at him gratefully.

He remembers it. Blind faith and faithlessness, a grumpy teenager woken up far too early on Sunday mornings to listen to the drones of a priest, the sleepy spicy scent of incense winding a fog through his head to dull out the words with his own reluctance. He remembers, and he understands, and he relishes every conversion, every baptism, at the way morning glories open to the sunlight to realize how beautiful they have become, how beautiful they have always been.

The whisperings and chatter die down as he clears his throat. Eager to listen, eager to believe, eager to have faith. The churchgoers strain forward to hear his every word, and Erwin feels important, feels glorious. His face is painted blues and greens and roses, the sermon pages crackling gently beneath his hands as his fingertips skirt over the soft indents of well-memorized and practiced words, gathered up hastily and bundled together in order just a few hours ago.

His faith is unshakable.

* * *

 

Organ swells, piping music through the chapel, and the parishioners’ voices lift in a swoop, a hymn, souls bound together neatly with the twine of their words and the ropes of their belief. For an instant, a brief moment in time, they are swept away. Transcendent.

Erwin finds the transformation exquisite, and is gratified to be able to witness the ascensions. Humans into angels, a man erasing his shadow to discover that his silhouette has wings, and the only thing keeping himself back from flight was himself.

* * *

 

But men aren’t meant to fly, aren’t meant to sprout wings and soar too close to the sun, a stern, swift reminder of Icarus and his failures, wax dripping down his features and solidifying his tears as he stumbled broken to the ground again. For Erwin, the disillusionment happens after the hymns finish. He falls, ball and chain, tethered to the ground, and chokes on his mortal shortcomings.

The church falls silent, last breaths and exhalations quivering out the memories of final notes. Erwin closes his eyes for a moment to revel in the soft remembered glory, and so he misses the door at the far end of the chapel opening, the wood pressing open with a soft shushing of wood against carpet to spill the cool January sunlight across the floors.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s there. It’s there. Sitting at the end of the second pew on his left, a splotch of inky blackness to devastate the purity of the chapel, and Erwin’s breath catches in his throat as the dream solidifies into reality, water into ice gluing his fingers together and freezing the words of his sermon into the back of his throat. Memory fails him, and the words lose their meaning, a tempest, a maelstrom, jolting around violently, syllables ricocheting through his skull.

You should not be here! he wants to shout, dousing the incubus with holy water and shooing it out of the chapel. One drop of ink is all it takes to stain the milk, and, breathless and half-terrified, Erwin watches as it picks up one of the Bibles, plucks it by its well-worn cover from the back of the seat in front of it, thumbs through the pages with a vague little smile on its face.

It touches the holy words with a grace unbecoming of its nature, stroking the pages almost reverently. Almost a mockery.

“Father? Are you quite alright?”

A parishioner in the front row pipes up, voice concerned. He blinks once, twice, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand as though this will help him remove the blight from his line of vision. When he pulls his hand away, the incubus is still there. Looking at him, a smirk playing around the corners of its mouth as it snaps the Bible closed, a soft whap of leather against paper.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he replies, clearing his throat and smoothing out the pages of his sermon again, which have inexplicably wrinkled beneath his palms.


	3. Leviticus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betaed by Peach_oniisan~

Levi sits through the entire sermon, letting his head loll back against the sturdiness of the wooden pews as Erwin’s voice reverberates shaky around the walls; a quivering candle flame trying to burn bright through the veil of the night. He doesn’t so much as flinch when Erwin invites the parishioners up for Communion, holding out the chalice of wine, the silver platter of the Host. He slips neatly into the ordered queue as though he belongs there, a dark shadow to cap off the veil of holiness.

Erwin tries not to let his hands shake, tries to ignore the way the deep red claret ripples in the cup, distorting the underside of his reflection and wavering his faith into concentric circles. Erwin can barely breathe as the incubus inches closer. He lays Communion wafers on willing tongues, washed down with sips of wine and a blessing half-hearted and bestowed from routine. 

He is the last in line. A perfect triangle of the Host lays on the platter between them, one last sip of holiness left in the chalice. The other parishioners’ voices start to fade, chatting about worldly affairs, whose son got accepted into which school, which couple was getting a divorce; things that Erwin will undoubtedly hear later through the latticed slats of the confessional. But for now, his attention is fully consumed by the being in front of him, clad all in black and grey like smoke spilling from the glowing cherry of a cigarette.

Levi waits impatiently, tapping his foot, muffled thumps on the carpeting, but when Erwin dares to lift his gaze, he finds himself greeted with eyes crinkled at the corners in amusement. 

“Well, go on, Father.” The left corner of the demon’s  mouth quirks up in amusement, eyes so black, chips of obsidian, feathered with the longest lashes that Erwin has ever seen on anybody. “Aren’t you going to bless me?" 

Erwin swallows, not trusting himself to speak, his breath running ragged in the back of his throat. With trembling fingers, he picks up the final piece of Communion wafer, holds it carefully between thumb and forefinger towards an open mouth, pale rosebud lips parting to receive the Host. He fully expects it to burn, some half-hidden notion that a holy nova will burn the demon up from the inside out. He fully expects something, anything, a testament to the all-consuming power of the Lord, and he tries not to shudder as the demon’s lips graze against his fingertips, the butterfly kiss of a tongue sandpaper smooth against his skin.

Lips pinch together, wrapping around the wafer, moistening, softening, and Erwin waits, breathless, for his retribution. A swallow, the Adam’s apple bobbing in the delicate column of his throat. And yet.

He doesn’t burst into flames, he doesn’t clutch at his throat with convulsions, and instead smiles almost kindly, almost cruelly, up at Erwin as he reaches out and takes the chalice from the priest’s fingers, suddenly slack around the metal.

When the chalice is lowered again, his lips are painted burgundy. 

A whisper, a half-dropped promise to see him again, and he leaves, wrapping Erwin’s fingers around the slender stem of the empty goblet, a few stray droplets of wine against the rim. His shadow stretches across the floor, long-limbed, long-fingered as he reaches out to open the door, and Erwin finds that he cannot bring himself to look as the sunlight frames his silhouette in gold.

The incubus occupies his mind for the rest of the day; thoughts creeping in when he isn’t paying attention, trimming the wicks of the prayer candles, straightening out the kneeling cushions stashed underneath the seats of the pews.

It’s ecstatic, it’s terrifying, being given such blatant confirmation of the things he cannot see, have them made tangible and visible to his eyes. The time slips away in between the end of Mass and the hours of the confessional. Sunlight painted in golds and roses crawls nimble fingers across the floor and catching in Erwin’s hair as he bends his head over steepled fingers and prays for an answer. The soft, comforting smell of the church winds its way around him, with dancing motes of dust, the polished scent of warm wood and the spicy memories of incense, swung in a smoky censer along the aisles earlier that morning. But try as he might, God is dishearteningly silent.

* * *

 

That evening Erwin shrugs off the heavy weight of his cassock and retires to the armchair in the corner of his bedroom, folding the stiff material over one arm and placing it neatly in his closet. He draws the floor lamp closer, clicking it on so its golden warmth floods the room to crowd out the darkness creeping in the corners. The heft of his Bible is comforting in the palm of his hand, the cracked and well-worn spine falling open easily with just the barest hint of prompting. The gold leaf tinting the edges of the pages gleams in the light, smooth against his fingertips as he turns the thin sheaves of paper, searching for a solution; a verse to set the tension in his heart to rest. Angels step outside neatly delineated boundaries, the feathers of their wings catching fire; sobbing as they were cast down to the earth to make amends among mankind. They exist, Erwin knows, and his eyelids grow heavy as they scan through the fine print, page after page, book after book.

He searches for Lilith, hiding between the pages, her wings filled with sin to drag away unsuspecting men into temptation.

Crickets chirp outside, then fall silent. A chill worms its way in through the windowsill, the night coming back to reclaim its territory. Erwin struggles to stay awake, but cannot even bring himself to gasp as the pages ruffle; flipping backwards in an icy breath that has the fine golden hairs on his arms standing on end. The spine shakes apart in his hands, Revelations and Titus spilling to the floor in sheaves of gold. 

It flips all the way back to the Old Testament, Book 3; the title page of Leviticus, in beautifully calligraphed ink, presents the title of the book.

“That’s my name,” a voice whispers heavy in his ear, slick syllables cool against his skin, and an involuntary shiver racks its way up Erwin’s spine. “Isn’t it lovely, Father?”

His voice sounds strange, even to himself, gritting the words out from between clenched teeth. “A bit ironic, isn’t it? An incubus being named after a book of repentance.” 

“I’m repenting, Father, in my own small ways.” A chilly kiss, smooth petals against the curve of his ear, and as much as Erwin tries he cannot turn his head to look, isn’t sure if he wants to see blind faith made visible. “Please don’t call me that, though. I much prefer Levi. Leviticus is such a mouthful.”

He calls up Latin words, the syllables rusty in his mouth, and Levi laughs them away. He leans over Erwin’s shoulder to scratch out the rest of the book’s title, leaving deep gouges in the onion-skin paper.

“It’s getting past your bedtime, Father,” he murmurs, turning to Erwin. The rest of the prayers and pleas to God fall silent from his lips, and frozen, he allows himself to be led to the mattress; allows himself to be tucked in with icy fingers. “Sweet dreams.”

The lamp clicks off, the room awash in darkness, and Erwin stares frantically up at the ceiling, paralyzed, and allows himself to believe that perhaps this will all be over when he wakes up again.

* * *

 

He wakes up sticky, the sheets tangled around him, cold sweat dampening his hair to a burnished gold at the temples. Everything is as it was, not a single object out of place, and he relaxes just the slightest, his heart stilling in his chest.

His Bible sits innocently on the armchair, closed, its spine cracked and well-worn, all the pages accounted for. He smiles, laughing in spite of himself. Silly, foolish; a grown man taking nightmares into stock.

Then the laughter dies in his throat and mirth turns sour against his tongue, as he picks it up and lets it fall open to where the pages have been slashed rough across the middle.


	4. Numbers

Erwin spends long nights in the library attached to the church, old onion-skin pages of yellowing books brushing dry and dusty against his fingertips, the ink crumbling into little black specks against his skin if he so much as turns the pages a bit too roughly. His rosary is all but worn smooth, the wooden beads clicking hollowly as he runs them through his hands again and again, praying for help, praying for guidance. He’s considered that perhaps his mind is going, that perhaps somehow, somewhere in the spiraling genetic code of his life, some base has gone mispaired, some mutation has slipped by undetected, causing him to have visions of demons and things that go bump in the night. And the other possibilities, too, of course, the seeds of cancer growing rampant like kudzu over the grey matter in his skull, some sort of chemical imbalance, something that men of science might be able to explain away with test tubes and vials of blood held under a microscope.

Six vials of his blood are currently in the hospital system, labeled neatly with his name and blood type (Erwin Smith, B+, just this side of average), hundreds of thousands of red cells skittering around the glass, round and round in crimson circles, and he wonders what exactly he hopes to achieve from this. He’s wondered ever since the phlebotomist at UCSF had slipped the needle neatly into the vein at the crook of his arm, and he’d watched with a sort of morbid fascination as he fills the vials with his life. Will it be better to find something, or will it be the more infuriating to find that he is perfectly, horrifyingly normal?

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hand, trying to ignore the tactile memories of Levi’s fingers against his skin, wrapping his hands around the slender golden stem of the empty chalice. He tries to drown out the half-whispered sensations of the thin chap of Levi’s lips, grazing against his fingertips as he had accepted the Host, devouring it, consuming it with eager eyes.

He’d started the search five nights ago, mincing out reassuring words to the other priests and parishioners who had expressed concern over the purple shadows gathering like storm clouds beneath his eyes. Hesitant to sleep, hesitant to rest his cheek against the cool cotton of the pillowcase, hesitant to lose control just in case Levi – no, he can’t refer to him by name, it is far too personal – just in case the demon comes spilling back into his life again. All has been quiet so far, falling asleep as the sun had started to stain the horizon with pink and gold and waking just in time for morning services, pulling his limbs through his cassock and tucking the collar limply around his neck. Five days have come and gone, prayers said and left unheard, and Erwin would chalk it up to a soft period of distress in his life, an overactive imagination, but there’s still the question of the gouges in his Bible, far too deliberate and far too deep for the faithful vessel of his fingertips to contemplate.

The lamp above his head casts his profile into sharp shadow against the pages spread out in front of him.

Demons of the Middle Ages, written in curling gold script across the spine, hidden away in the farthest recesses of the church’s library. He yawns, takes another sip of coffee, and begs God to forgive His humble servant his vices. His eyelids are heavy, gravity dragging them down even despite his best efforts, and he cups his chin in the palm of his hand, propping his head up as he struggles to stay awake. His eyes skitter listlessly over the spattered ink images, drawn in a hand that has long ago withered into ash and dust, pentagrams and Latin inscriptions and a list of ingredients for a summoning. No, he doesn’t need a summoning, he thinks to himself, shaking his head and flipping through the book to a few chapters ahead.

The chapters on exorcism are well thumbed through, the corners of the pages crumpled and folded down, the paper nearly see-through from where anxious fingers long gone have probably skimmed through the lines searching for a solution. Erwin wonders absentmindedly if they’ve found it, or if they’ve found that the demons existed only in their own heads, set free to torment and torture when self-doubt settled in gritty against the soul.

The simplest list has four items, easily bought and easily broken.

Crucifix.

Container of salt.

Vial of holy water.

Scrolls of Latin words committed to memory to banish the demon.

Erwin mouths the words to himself, feeling the soft weight on his tongue and trying to ignore the way the letters fail to bring him soothing comfort.

“The demon may display aggression,” the text warns him. “It may use all manner of trickery to deceive you. Do not, under any circumstances, be taken in, and if possible have outside assistance. Exorcisms have a nasty habit of spinning out of control.”

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the banishing of demons from bodily possession, and for the first time, Erwin wonders if there is a poor, innocent soul born into this world trapped beneath Levi’s cunning tongue. It would certainly explain the tangibility of it all, the way his skin had felt against Erwin’s, thumb pressed up against his pulse ever so delicately. Levi’s skin had been dry, soft, almost human, and this, more than anything else, had frightened Erwin into the sanctity of the church’s library.

We stopped checking for monsters under our beds when we realized they were inside us. The quote bounces through his head, something from The Dark Knight, perhaps CSI, intoned in a deep, gruff voice to ingrain the words into his memory.

Is this what happened to the little lost soul wandering with silver eyes and creeping shadows, gouging out the middles of Bibles and blowing out the candles? Perhaps, perhaps.

Three hours later, when Erwin’s bladder is full to bursting with coffee and his head has grown too heavy for his hand to support, he totters out of the library, his mind heavy with newly acquired knowledge that he had never once thought he’d have occasion to use. Demonic exorcisms and the supernatural are things that only exist splayed across silver screens, and Erwin, frankly, finds the whole thing a little bit silly, but this doesn’t stop him from reaching into his kitchen cabinets to pull out his canister of Morton’s salt. Large handfuls spill across the doorframe, thick white layer of crystals to line his windowsills, a fat circle around the bed. He straightens the crucifix above his bed, giving it a few reassuring pats and tugs to make sure it is steady in its position. The weight of the wood and the molded Jesus is satisfyingly heavy in his palm.

Two minutes of prayer, his knees aching against the floor as he steeples his fingers and closes his eyes, mouthing wishes and hopes to the Lord. He asks for good health, and asks for good help in equal measure.

Surrounded by salt and watched over with the unseeing eyes of the effigy, Erwin lays down, his cheek creasing the cool cotton pillowcase, and closes his eyes to rest.

* * *

 

Levi wriggles his way into his only dream that night, fitful and writhing in the bed sheets, his limbs tangling in the comforter and bathing him in a cool sweat.

“Do you not like me, Father?” Levi asks him, his voice coming foggy through the thick cotton of his dream. His tone is almost pitiful, the slouch of his spine nearly hidden by the gloam of sleepiness. Erwin watches, his eyes aching, as Levi nudges a toe at the thick line of salt marking off Erwin’s bedroom. “Some servant of the Lord you are,” he snorts. “I thought you were supposed to accept all. Do no harm.”

“That’s for doctors,” Erwin informs him, surprised that his voice still works, surprised that he can force the words out past the tight squeeze of his throat around his breath. “Not for priests.”

“But I’m very sick, Father,” Levi murmurs, his eyes flashing up to meet Erwin’s, piercing gaze and long, fluttering lashes that remind Erwin all too painfully of a girl he used to love before he rescinded the trials and tribulations of the world for God. “And you want to save me, don’t you?”

Erwin struggles to find an adequate response. His hesitation is all that Levi needs, apparently, and with a soft, dramatic sigh, the wind creeps in through the crack in the window frame and carries him away in a swirl of smoke.

* * *

 

And, for one glorious week, Erwin is caught in the uncertain limbo of knowing and not knowing. His blood results come back negative for everything. He’s gloriously, infuriatingly healthy, and yet he cannot ignore the fact that his Bible across the title page of the third chapter, cannot ignore the way his eyes drift over to the pew where Levi’s shadow still seems to stain the wood when he’s giving Sunday sermon. For one glorious week, Erwin thinks that perhaps Levi has left of his own accord, grown hungry to feast on another unsuspecting member of the populace. For one glorious week, Erwin allows himself to wonder about the incubus.

His sleep grows so restful that he does not notice the crucifix above his bed swaying slightly back and forth on its hangings, a creak, creak, creak in the night, until it slides down the wall and cracks in half across the floor.


	5. Judges

“Incubi?” The girl who comes in to clean the rectory once a week, a sweet lovely girl by the name of Petra Ral, is just on the cusp of adulthood, just on the verge of breaking into herself. Her face still retains the soft curves of baby fat, the shadows of childhood linger sparkling in her amber eyes, and she wears sparkly barrettes in her hair to pin back her bangs. The rhinestone flowers glimmer in the golden afternoon light as she squints at the books spread out over Erwin’s desk, onionskin pages and sketched illustrations drawn so deeply on the paper that the edges of the pages curl over onto themselves. “Why are you reading about this, Father?”

Erwin wonders if he’ll ever be able to hear the address without thinking about Levi, who he hasn’t seen since but whose whispers haunt the crevices of his mind, calling his values into question. Don’t you want to save me, Father? Almost mocking, almost irreverential. But yes, he had taken a vow, he had promised in front of man and God that he would never turn away the sick, that he would never deny a lost soul the chance to be saved, and here he was doing exactly that.

“Just some light recreational reading,” he murmurs absentmindedly, watching the sunlight thread golden fingers through Petra’s hair as she fluffs the pillows on the bed and folds back the coverlets into neat creases. “I had a parishioner come to me about some televised drama they were watching or something of the sort, wondering about how accurate it was to canonical verse.”

Petra arches an eyebrow at him from across the room, and he can tell she doesn’t believe him. For good reason, too; lies have slipped as easy from his mouth in the past few weeks as neatly as pebbles sinking to the bottom of a riverbed.

“This hardly looks recreational,” she informs him, closing the books on their illustrations and moving the dusty tomes to the side of his desk so she can wipe down the wooden surface with cloths that send motes of dust swirling up into the golden shafts of sunlight. “And for the record, I don’t think there are any incubi in Supernatural? I’m pretty caught up on the show, but maybe things have changed in the last two episodes.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Erwin replies, absentmindedly, his eyes lingering over the spot where the crucifix above his bed had hung until only recently. The wallpaper is brighter there, not yet having had a chance to fade under the kiss of sunlight, and he’s spent ages running his fingers over the bright splotch of paper, crisp beneath his fingertips, alternating between wondering whether or not to hang another crucifix and scolding himself for even entertaining the thoughts of doubt that have started to creep across his mind.

He’s healthy, and it terrifies him to know that maybe, just maybe, Levi is real. It terrifies him to think about the implications of belief.

Petra’s words break him out of his thoughts, bright innocent syllables to wash away the dusty thoughts of Levi. “Although I thought those demons would look…I dunno, more attractive, I guess? Or maybe they were just pretty bad artists back in the day? These drawings look about five hundred years old.”

“They probably are,” Erwin says with a shrug. The corners of the pages of the books he’s taken out from the church’s library have crumbled dusty in his fingers on more than one occasion, and the inky sketches Petra’s talking about are indeed not conventionally attractive, not by any standards Erwin’s aware of. The incubi and succubi outlined on the pages are all voluptuous curves and soft folds of flesh that have started to yellow with age, the very pictures of indulgence and hedonism, long, forked tongues wrapped around their fingertips that curl and beckon the onlooker closer, closer, and closer still. “But who knows? Maybe five hundred years ago, this was exactly what people liked to see.”

Levi doesn’t look like the pictures at all, and yet, Erwin has no doubt that the demon is telling the truth about himself. Levi has no reason to lie, and it’s been a struggle for Erwin to reconcile the canonical illustrations with the reality that’s started to leach slowly back into his life, the shadows flickering in the corner of his vision when he turns his head, the slight twitches in the shadows at the corners of the room when he turns off the lights to head to bed.

“Maybe,” Petra replies doubtfully, folding her cloths back into neat little squares again and heading over to the windowsill to polish the squares of milky glass. Erwin turns back to look at the illustrations again, to reaffirm his assessments of their utter dissimilarities to Levi, and so does not see Petra wrinkling her nose as she wipes away the last thin film of salt that coats the windowsill with white.

* * *

 

Later that night, Erwin cannot say he’s surprised when he feels a chill swipe icy fingers through his bedroom, raising the hairs on the back of his neck as it traces along the knobs of his vertebrae, cold and frigid even through the thick sweater he’s wearing to ward off the unexpected frost that’s settled thick curlicues across the glass of his bedroom window. He’s called him back, probably, curiosity killed the cat, and the books stacked high to the side of his desk seem to mock him with their dusty covers and their inky illustrations.

“Been missing me, have you, Father? I see you’ve been doing a bit of research.” The whisper settles piercing in his ear, and Erwin turns around slowly, centimeters, to find Levi lounging lazy on his bed. The demon’s weight barely makes shadowy indentations in the covers, and with a heavy sense of regret that settles disquieting in the pit of his belly, Erwin notes that the demon is, by all standards both conventional and personal, Levi is undeniably attractive. The softly golden glow of the desk lamp gathers to gleam milky in the hollows of his collarbones, to paint the swell of his lower lip with a rosy blush that’s just this side of obscene. Stretched out like this, Levi reminds Erwin of a Botticelli painting, cream flesh and limbs layered out with just a thin film of softness, but he is nothing like the excess all the books and scholars of old seem to agree on.

“You’ve piqued my interest,” Erwin explains, and truthfully, the fear and distrust that he should feel isn’t present, chased away by the unholiness of Levi’s beauty. And perhaps, he thinks to himself, drawing his chair closer to the bed, this is how it begins, a falling, a small step into sin, a descent into temptation. “More than you’ve any right to.”

Levi examines his nails, holding his hand out in front of his face. The light glistens on his skin.

“And you mine,” he replies, arching a fine eyebrow at Erwin. “Are you sure you’re just a mere vessel of the Lord, Erwin Smith?”

Erwin stops short, the answer on the tip of his tongue vying for space with all the questions that roil at the forefront of his mind. He is, and he isn’t, and Levi makes him sound like he could be so much more. Torn between blasphemy and inquisitiveness, Erwin chooses the lesser of two evils.

“Tell me about yourself,” he says, deflecting the question in a voice he’s proud to say is firmer than he’d expected, revealing none of the doubtful conflicts that rage and rampage through his soul. “It’s only fair, don’t you think, if you’re going to be trespassing in the house of the Lord with such impunity?”

Levi rolls his eyes, the picture of insouciance, and Erwin thinks that perhaps he’s more similar to the illustrations than he’d previously thought. “It was my house once, too,” he murmurs, in a voice with flat tones that sounds almost bitterly nostalgic. “I think I should be allowed to visit, every once in a while. One question for tonight, Father, and then it will be your bedtime, I think.”

Erwin’s fingers itch to record all of Levi’s words, scribbling and scrawling messy ink across the pages of his freshly written Sunday sermon, already planned out down to the verses though it’s but Wednesday, but he tries to proceed with caution, to temper the burning curiosity that threatens to incinerate him from the inside out.

Does God exist? Is there a Heaven? When will the Second Coming happen? The questions cloud his thoughts fast and furious, but the one that made its way into the open air was horrifically selfish in comparison.

“Why don’t you just get it over with? Have me. It’s what you’re made to do, isn’t it?”

Levi’s eyes narrow, examining him, and Erwin is almost gratified to see a flicker of confusion in his expression. The sheets shiver satin beneath Levi’s weight as Levi shifts, sitting up to level his gaze with Erwin’s. “That’s two questions, Father,” he murmurs, his only slightly-pointed tongue flickering out to lick at the swell of his lower lip. Erwin traces the undulation. “But I’m feeling generous tonight.”

Slipping off the bed, Erwin’s eyes are captivated by the sway of his hips as Levi walks soundlessly towards him, bridging the small distance in a breath and driving out Erwin’s exhalations as he pins Erwin into the desk chair with long limbs and chilly skin that sends inexplicable flushes of warmth shuddering through Erwin’s soul.

“Let’s get one thing clear, hmm?” This close, Erwin can see that Levi’s pupils are slitted, and his breath catches in his throat. “I’m not made to do anything. I do as I please.” A pale, long-fingered hand slides up beneath his sweater, and Erwin gasps, longing to strain away, his limbs frozen in terror tempered with a violent desire to know what happens next. Knuckles brush against his chest, goosebumps spilling across the skin as Levi wraps his fingers around the finely wrought metal of the cross that hangs around Erwin’s neck.

“As for your second question…” Levi trails off, tugging at the chain, and Erwin still half expects him to let the cross drop back to Erwin’s thudding heart, hissing in pain as his skin burns and melts away under the power of God. But of course he doesn’t, Levi’s defied all his other expectations up until this point, and Erwin can feel the thin clasp straining at the nape of his neck as Levi tugs, tugs, tugs some more until it breaks with a small snap and scatters miniscule gold links gleaming across the carpet.

“Why, I’m simply not hungry,” Levi finishes, pulling out his curled hand from beneath Erwin’s sweater and scattering the necklace to pool useless in his lap. “Sleep well, Father. We’ll be in touch.” With that, Levi stands up, leaning forward to press a chilly kiss to Erwin’s forehead in a mocking parody of something that could be construed as love, something that could almost be tenderness. He pads out of the room as silently as he’d come, leaving Erwin to stare at the puddle of gold in his lap and try to ignore the way heat blossoms reluctant petals in the pit of his belly.

 

 


	6. Ruth

Reluctant as he is to admit it, Erwin gradually becomes used to Levi’s presence, which has started to pick up more as January melts into February into March. The initial ebbing horror that seeps into the pit of his stomach whenever he feels a chill seep through the room becomes replaced with something that feels dangerously close to anticipation, and the relief that he once felt whenever Levi left starts to fade into guilt that assaults him from all sides. And how easy it is to feel guilty, how easy to desire and ache for things that will burn you like moths drawn to the flames that spark fire all through the fragile gossamer of their wings. With every passing visit and every passing day, Erwin cannot help but feel just the tiniest bit more sacrilegious.

Occasionally, whenever Levi says something the tiniest bit presumptuous, daring to go against Erwin’s beliefs, Erwin finds himself struggling for the Latin words that feel like dusty spikes in his mouth. He almost gets halfway through one litany under Levi’s half-amused stare before he lets the words drop to the carpet between them.

“You have to do it with feeling, Father,” Levi informs him, leaning over the bedside to pick up the holy book Erwin has dropped with a thump onto the rug. The spine is cracked, the leather covers scarred in Levi’s long fingers as he pages through the paper, looking for the place Erwin left off. He clears his throat, pointed tongue licking at the swell of his lip as he begins to read with a voice that nearly brings Erwin to his knees, so powerful and strong and overwhelming it is. The glass rattles in its fragile frames. “Like this,” Levi says, grinning wickedly as he holds out the book to Erwin’s trembling fingers. “You’re far too hesitant to be of any use to anyone. Try it, won’t you? Again, with feeling.”

Erwin snatches back the book, a heavy weight in his hands, the pages rippling against his fingers like water, but try as he might the words no longer come easy to his tongue. Levi laughs, a merry trill like a waterfall to tickle up every vertebra of his spine.

“You won’t do it,” Levi murmurs, spread-eagling his limbs across Erwin’s sheets to infect them with his chill, the same chill that will have Erwin wrapping the blankets around him, shuddering in his dreams in the middle of the night as he tries to warm himself up, burying his nose in quilts that smell like pine and mint and cedar, a crisp clean scent that he’s come to associate with Levi. “As disgusting as I might be, you’re starting to like me, aren’t you, Father?”

But Levi’s wrong about one part, and that terrifies Erwin. He doesn’t find Levi disgusting, doesn’t find him dangerous and demonic though God knows he should. And oh, how much God knows, the little battles Erwin has with himself every day, how heavy the cassock and priestly vestments have started to settle on his shoulders, how he’s started to stiffen and bend under their weight as though he is no longer strong enough to stand up straight. By all accounts, he should be angry, furious, livid that Levi has taken away even this, the beliefs that he cannot see.

Occasionally, Levi’s name appears on the tip of his tongue when he’s meeting with the other priests, and occasionally he pauses, gathering his thoughts while they wait, patient specters in black silence looking askance while he collects his words again. But Erwin stops himself short, because it never seems the right time, it never seems the right moment to let Levi become common knowledge. Something deep and humanly selfish in the pit of Erwin’s belly makes him hold his tongue, makes him keep Levi his own little secret, whispering that the other priests certainly wouldn’t understand how such a godly man can harbor demons with ease, whispering that they don’t know that we don’t have to be afraid of demons because the worst ones are already inside us.

And so the months melt away, and Erwin cannot deny that he feels just the tiniest bit lonely on nights when Levi is elsewhere. Tonight is just such a night, particularly cold for March with the sea breezes bringing in the smell of salt and coldness to leach into the room, and Erwin swaddles himself in layers of blankets as he pulls up a chair to his desk and tugs the old books back to him once again. His feverish eyes scan the page, squinting whenever the script crumbles away into nothingness, frowning at every author whose longhand cursive deceives him with its loops and twists.

This particular book bears the title “The Valley of Shadow: A Firsthand Account,” following an anonymous author who documents the incubi and succubi that drop into his life. Some people seem to be more apt to their attentions than most, it reads, and Erwin appreciates the nonjudgmental tone the writer reserves for these demons, the lost souls floundering for guidance. The narrative is fascinating, and he’s spent days, weeks, poring over the passages and marveling at its similarities to his own experience with Levi so far.

“And how could it have been wrong, loving like this? Love is a pure emotion and burns clean all in its path.” He jolts out of the light stupor he’s fallen into. Love? No, certainly not, it’s unholy, he scoffs to himself, and yet he cannot stop himself from riffling through the rest of the chapter’s pages, eager to find out what happens next. Undeniable, love suffuses every sentence and every line, and the author describes the succubi as a lovely woman named Lilith who whispered sweetness into his soul and made him believe that monsters can carry beauty just as well as angels can.

Lilith. Lilith. Lilith. Voluptuous, with hair as dark as the night, skin as pale as milk, softness and grace with every step she took, she had entranced the author into desperate desire, sparking fires in his bloodstream and feasting at the flames with lips painted like crimson bows. Erwin wonders what it says about him, that his personal drug of choice is a man. A man? He wonders to himself, slotting a bookmark neatly into the pages and tapping the tome closed. It doesn’t seem the right word to describe Levi with, because Levi is so much more. He wonders if he can ever come to love Levi like the author had loved Lilith, wonders if someday his hand will be the one to scrawl emotion across the pages for later servants of God to pore over in curiosity and the desperation for knowledge. By all accounts, Levi and Lilith should have been banished long ago, and by all accounts, Erwin finds himself growing to understand why they were not. Man’s compassion is always his biggest weakness, and the author had succumbed to it much like Erwin was in the process of doing.

Erwin creeps into bed, tugging the covers up securely around himself, and wonders when he began to enjoy feeling powerless.


	7. Kings

“I am starting to lose faith,” Erwin says quietly to the priest sitting on the other side of the latticed screen of the confessional. “And paradoxically, I think my faith is stronger than ever before.”

“Oh? Is that right?” The priest’s voice at Good Tidings Congressional, on the other side of the city, is calm and deep, and Erwin feels particularly naked sitting on this side of the wooden box, has felt particularly naked ever since Levi snapped the fine links of his golden cross to scatter gleaming across his floor and puddle useless in his lap. “What makes you say that?”

“There have been some things I’ve experienced in the past few months that have caused me to question my beliefs,” Erwin murmurs, thinking about how recently, in the past week, he’s been making no move to push Levi out of his bed when the incubus lifts up the covers with a soft whisper of cotton and slots himself neatly into the hollow of Erwin’s body as though he has always belonged there and nowhere else. He tucks his head into the crook of Erwin’s neck, listening to his pulse and laughing when it never fails to pick up just the slightest of paces, cool fingertips relieving in the stifling heat of summer as they brush up against Erwin’s skin. Against bitterly bitten intentions, Erwin finds himself slipping into temptation and welcoming the crest and fall headlong, but frustratingly, it is Levi who resists. Always Levi, though for all intents and purposes his nature should be the one calling him to taste, to feast on the spread of Erwin’s infuriatingly willing body and soul.

Last night had been one such night, and Erwin had been frozen in his own thoughts, watching from under lidded eyes as Levi’s creamy limbs gleamed in the moonlight, fingertips skittering over his own skin, gentle, admiring, vain in the body he has been given, and anger and bitter regret welled up metallic in the corners of his mouth as he tried to tear his eyes away from the pearly contours of Levi’s body and tried to batten down the hatches of affection. Levi had taken to wrapping one of Erwin’s shirts around himself before he came into Erwin’s bed, and the panels fluttered silky around his thighs as he hoisted himself up onto the mattress with the soft familiarity of someone who has done it many times before, and Erwin resented him that even as he ached and wished desperate to bury his nose in Levi’s inky hair to smell the clean scent of his own damnation.

The priest cleared his throat on the other side of the confessional. “Could you elaborate on that, my child?”

Erwin furrowed his eyebrows, his fingers curling tight white around his knees, uncurling slowly to feel the ache as he wondered what to do next, what to say. Suddenly the wooden lacquer of the box felt far too suffocating, suddenly he felt trapped and the words refused to come easy to his the tip of his tongue, though he’d spent the grey early morning hours reciting them to himself in the mirror. Levi had still been fast asleep, a smear of black and cream tangled in his sheets, and if he had been being well and truly honest with himself, Erwin was surprised that Levi was still here. He usually slipped out sometime in the middle of the night, the vague whispers of kisses against the shell of Erwin’s ear, cold hands tugging the covers up tighter around his chin like the softest and most loving of nooses. Erwin had watched the slow rise and fall of Levi’s chest in the mirror, had struggled with the flames of altogether too human want curling in the pit of his belly, and had tried to lift a hand to his Bible.

It had fallen weakly, ineffectually, back to his side, and Erwin had sighed and finished dressing, admitting defeat.

“I believe I am starting to have feelings for someone who is actively luring me away from God.” And oh, how good the words feel to say out loud, how good it feels to affirm his affections behind the sterile rigidity of language. Erwin takes a deep breath, scented with incense and the warm smell of wood. “I thought I could manage it, but I was foolish, Father. I need help.”

“Yet you say you also think your faith is stronger than it was before?” The priest’s mild tone is laced with confusion. “Is this because of the same person?”

“Yes,” Erwin agrees, nodding his head and looking at the priest’s dark silhouette through the slender squares of lattice that separate them, and trying not to think about how the early sunlight had crept fingers across the room to paint shadows across Levi’s cheekbones. “I have never believed so much in God.”

“Could you elaborate on that a little more?”

Erwin frowns. Levi’s novelty has worn off, but Erwin is still reluctant to let anyone else know about him, the fear of being believed and having Levi torn away through means he has not yet tried persuading him to hold his tongue.

“You can tell the Lord anything, you know that, don’t you?”

Yes, of course Erwin knows that. The confessional holds no secrets, but this is one that he thinks he might want to keep from the eyes of even God Himself. He settles for a non-answer and an answer all in itself.

“I love a man,” he says, simply, and there is a short pause before the priest turns to him, a shifting of shadows behind the screen that separates the sinner and the saint, and a thrill runs down Erwin’s spine.

“Do you love him? Really, truly?” Levi’s voice, and Erwin’s breath catches in his throat, anger and admiration and anxiety all caught up into one great swell that clutches his lungs tight in his chest. He’s played masterfully into the invisible gossamer of Levi’s words like spider silk to wrap around his limbs, and it only surprises him all the further that his words ring true to his own ears.

“Yes.” Simple, neat, clean. “I do.”

“Do you repent of your sins?” Perhaps he’s tired, perhaps he’s imagining it, but Erwin thinks he can hear a note of worry in Levi’s voice.

“I do not think I can,” he breathes, and is rewarded with a soft sigh of relief from the other side of the curtain. “I still need to be cleansed of my sins,” he reminds Levi gently, when Levi fails to respond. “Please give me my penance, let me know how I can set things right.”

The lattice slides open, slides into a recess in the wall, and suddenly Levi, gleaming, beautiful, damning, is pushing the curtain aside, dust dancing in the streams of golden sunlight as he reaches out, long hands, longer fingers, to fist in Erwin’s shirt and tug him close into a kiss that sears them both.


	8. Chronicles

Like a lit fuse, the spark of Erwin’s love flares and hisses quickly into oblivion, igniting him like a pyre and lighting him aflame. It gets to the point where he pushes writing the Sunday sermon back to Thursday, to Friday, to Saturday the night before, because the words seem so hollow, scripted letters on paper that still can’t manage to conjure up the images of Heaven and Hell and everywhere in between that Levi has whispered into his ears, underneath the sheets, into his mouth, curling syllables with every breath and every kiss that passes between them.

His questions come, and Levi’s answers come faster, the walls that separate them blurring and fading away, crumbling brick by brick with every exchange and every night that Erwin allows Levi to fill the empty hollow in the other half of the bed. The sheets and mattress hold an imprint of Levi’s body, familiar but so faint that Erwin still has to squint to prove to his eyes that it is there, has to run his fingers over puddles of soft cotton to reassure himself that he isn’t imagining things.

Some nights, Levi does not come at all and Erwin spends those long, lonely hours driven to distraction, wondering where Levi is and what could possibly have kept him away. Nights like these, Erwin’s mind runs rife with confusion, stained with a low grade of panic that infiltrates his thoughts and coats every single one of them with a fear and dread that he cannot quite seem to displace until he sees Levi again.

“Where do you go?” he asks, breathless, and cringes away at the tone in his voice. It’s needy, desperate, demanding, wrong in all the ways he does not want it to be, and Levi eyes him over an old book he’s reading, one that Erwin’s pilfered from the chapel’s Restricted archives just for him. Levi drives him to greater heights than he’s ever thought possible, and he loves and hates his newfound willpower and daring in equal measure. “Where do you go, when you’re not with me?”

“Jealous, are you?” Levi quips back, just as quickly, and Erwin winces at the sting Levi lathers into his words.

He makes to turn back to his books, to the sermon he’s supposed to be writing, well, revising already. It’s been left until the last minute yet again, and he winces as the clock ticks over to twelve, the bright cherry-red zeros on the digital display heralding the coming of a new day, a new week. The nib of his pen scratches over the paper, one line, two, words scrawling out and his hand moving of its own accord as he writes without meaning, looks without seeing.

Levi sighs, heavily. It sends a chill running up and down Erwin’s spine, though it’s the dead heat of late July and the windows are cracked wide in the futile fervent hopes of enticing in a wayward breeze laden with the scent of the sea that crashes breakers against the shore.

“I’ve been visiting home,” Levi says, finally, and Erwin’s curiosity outweighs the sting of the lashes left behind by Levi’s words. He sets down his pen, not even pretending to be invested in the Scripture anymore, and how relieving it is to let the façade drop and crumble into dust between them. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t exactly belong here.” He gestures around the room. The lamplight catches the motion of his arm and scatters the shadow into the corners.

“And what do you do, at home?” Erwin asks, trying desperately not to sound as though he cares, failing miserably. He has never needed anyone quite as much as he’s needed Levi, has never needed anyone to recount their activities and memories in minutiae, has never particularly cared, but Levi has inserted himself beneath his skin so quickly and so flawlessly that Erwin feels it like a gaping wound when Levi holds back parts of himself.

Levi shrugs, a slim hand placing a bookmark between the faded pages of his book and setting it aside on the nightstand. “This and that,” he says, noncommittally. “I eat, mostly.”

“You eat?” Erwin asks, nonplussed. It is not the answer he had been expecting. “What do you eat?”

“Three square meals a day, something in all the food groups,” Levi replies, a sass that has Erwin laughing despite himself, settling back into the familiar rhythm of give and take that they’ve established for themselves in this unlikely little relationship that they can call their own. “Don’t worry about me, okay? I’m eating all my fruits and veg.”

“I worry,” Erwin says, bravely. The words seem stuck in his throat. How to tell Levi that with every day he goes missing Erwin considers a day lost, one that he cannot regain? How to tell Levi that his absence aches far more than the guilt in his soul that Erwin shoves to the side in Levi’s presence? How to say that he wishes Levi would never leave, though it’s in his name, going, going, gone every time Erwin calls him? “Is it something I can help you with?” he settles for, and Levi simply rolls his eyes.

“It’s more of a personal issue,” he replies. “It doesn’t concern you.”

But Erwin is emboldened, feels stronger with the knowledge that Levi’s absences aren’t opportunities for him to warm the bed of another, and he pushes onward.

“What exactly do you eat?” he asks insistently. Even Levi has to grin at his persistence.

“What, all those books haven’t told you anything useful?” he asks, teasingly, slipping off the bed and traipsing over to the desk to seat himself in Erwin’s lap. Erwin’s hands, hungry, insatiable, drift upwards to settle themselves on the neat curves of Levi’s waist, incontrollable in a way that Levi should be and that Levi isn’t. Levi waves a hand over the books that still litter Erwin’s desk, scattering shadow over the gilded titles. They’ve been closed for ages, because Erwin no longer needs information on how to expel the demons, no longer wants to seek it out, because casting Levi from his life would leave him gaping open, a bruise an ache an agony that he cannot even think about finding the strength to bear.

“Why would I need those when I have a firsthand source?” Erwin asks, laying kisses in the curve where the slender column of Levi’s neck meets his shoulder. Levi laughs, cooling and comforting, as he leads Erwin to bed, the sermon unfinished.

 


	9. Song of Songs

The time passes slowly and yet far too fast, and Erwin cherishes the days that he has with Levi like no other. Levi brings with him color to paint the drabness of Erwin’s days, and for the first time since entering the clergy, Erwin begins to wonder if it’s possible that he’s made a mistake.

“Having doubts, Father?” Levi asks him, mockingly, looking over from where he’s reclining on Erwin’s bed, stretched out and limbs painted milky in the moonlight. “I can smell it on you. The uncertainty. You’re reeking of it.”

When Levi is coiled up a few minutes later, fast asleep with his head pillowed on his arm, Erwin takes a surreptitious sniff at the collar of his shirt, smelling nothing but the stale scent that lingers after a long day and the faintest remnants of aftershave and soap from his morning ablutions. No matter how hard he tries, he’s hard pressed to find the smell of desperation and uncertainty that offends Levi’s delicate sensibilities so much.

 ***

Despite all the time that they spend together, Erwin has yet to see Levi eat anything. He worries and frets over Levi’s apparent lack of appetite, and tries to entice him with different foods that he thinks he might like: ripe apples firm and glossy, fresh from the orchard with a crisp, tart bite; bars of dark, bittersweet chocolate that Levi obligingly takes one square from and lets it melt beneath his tongue; bowls of soup with clear salty broth and bits of meat so tender that they dissolve in his mouth. Levi turns the rest of his offerings away with an upturned nose, claiming disinterest.

The delicate sculptings of his ribs start to show through his thin sheets of ivory skin. The hollows of his clavicles become scooped out, pale tracings of bone that Erwin can run his fingers over. His face becomes gaunt over the course of weeks and months, dark circles bruising beneath his eyes in purple shadows. He doesn’t look well, not at all, not like the incubus that had crept into Erwin’s bedroom all that time ago, and Erwin’s concern grows. He turns away from the scripture, tries to find answers in the things Levi doesn’t say, and he claims false illness on some occasions just to spend more milky Sunday mornings with his body curled neatly around Levi’s in the mess of the sheets.

Levi’s skin is silky and warm, like the texture of cream beneath Erwin’s lips and fingers, but it’s started to stretch tight over his bones, as though it cannot hope to contain him, as though it’ll burst at the slightest provocation. Erwin holds his breath and waits for the jagged bone-white shards to pierce the skin.

“You should eat,” Erwin chides softly, one cool Saturday night when Levi’s head is pillowed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. His hair is a silky dark gloss against the faded cotton of Erwin’s T-shirt. “You’re going to fade away.”

Levi scoffs. “It’ll take a bit more than a little hunger to make me go away,” he says, with determination. “Sorry if I don’t gorge myself like those other ones you have in your little textbooks.” He waves a long hand in the general direction of Erwin’s desk, where the Sunday sermon lies unfinished, unthought about. It’s getting harder and harder for Erwin’s words to stick to the pages, and it’s getting harder and harder for him to conjure up true belief and the passion he’d once had.

It should concern him. It doesn’t. Levi’s eyes, the color of rainy days, hold him captive and refuse to let him go.

“Please,” Erwin whispers, tracing fingertips over the hollow between the wings of Levi’s shoulder blades. “Please eat something, if only for my own peace of mind.”

Levi pauses. Tenses. The set of his shoulders goes rigid beneath Erwin’s fingertips, and Erwin wants to backtrack, wants to snatch back his words as quickly as can be. “Your peace of mind?” Levi asks, finally, his voice shredded dark and raw. “Your peace of mind isn’t exactly my top priority right now, Father Smith.”

The tone in his voice stings, bites Erwin deep to the bone, and, seemingly against his will, he grips at the fleshy part of Levi’s upper arm. It bruises easily, and anger is five-fingered. Erwin feels a queasy mix of satisfaction and disgust as Levi flinches away from his tight grasp.

Levi is a far cry from the rippling, grotesque mounds of skin depicted in the yellowing, flaking pages of the books, and though it’s not something Erwin would have him strive for, he’s of the opinion that Levi looks more like a wraith than anything else currently. He takes it upon himself to make Levi more substantial, more of this universe than the fading space that he currently inhabits, but the Scripture is involved with the dispelling of demons, not the nurturing of them, and both Levi and Erwin know this all too well. Already the thick salt borders around Erwin’s bedroom have been swept and mopped up, already Erwin has stopped trying to rehang the crucifix above his headboard after it keeps falling and cracking on the floor. He does these things of his own will, and if Levi notices, he says nothing about it.

*** 

Levi grows weaker and weaker, a change that Erwin is loathe to notice, but cannot help but do so. He spends more and more of their time together sleeping, and the shadows beneath his eyes spiderweb indigo over the planes of his cheeks. His expression becomes pinched, becomes tight, becomes haunted in a way that filters into Erwin’s dreams and has him waking up in the middle of the night in a film of cold sweat.

“Please,” Erwin begs, when anger and irritation and intimidation no longer seem to work. “Please, tell me what I can do to keep you. I need to know.”

Levi’s eyes roll feverish beneath his eyelids. Though it’s the middle of summer, his skin is cold and papery, chilly beneath Erwin’s touch, and, in the absence of any known incubi illnesses or cures, Erwin has been doing his level best to keep Levi alive. He dribbles drips of water and salty soups between Levi’s cracked lips, sponges down Levi’s limbs and sighs when they fall back to the mattress a dead weight. It is only after Levi can no longer find the strength to crawl out of bed in the mornings, to visit Erwin in the hallowed halls of the chapel during the day, that both of them finally seem to realize how serious the situation truly is.

Levi’s chapped lips are slack, moving loose around his syllables as he weakly leads Erwin through the steps.

 ***

“You sure this’ll work?” Erwin asks, his fingers stilling over the zip to his slacks.

Levi huffs in a weak imitation of irritation. “It will. Trust me. It’s all I can bear.”

Erwin doesn’t question it further, but he make sure to wing a quick prayer for forgiveness, a wish for penance and resolution, as he peels himself out of his pants.

He strokes himself to reluctant orgasm under Levi’s watchful gaze, and turns his eyes away when Levi reaches out to pat at his thigh comfortingly, soothingly, his thumb gently stroking along the twitching, jumping muscles beneath the skin. With the strength he can muster, Levi presses himself against Erwin’s front, stealing kisses and swallowing man’s folly.

Erwin’s blood sings in his veins.

*** 

“Thanks,” Levi murmurs after Erwin has cleaned himself up, tucked himself into a fresh pair of pants shamefacedly. He’s already looking much better, perking up like a flower drinking in water after a long drought, roses blooming in his cheeks and his eyes brighter. “That was very kind of you. Very generous. But what else would you expect from a priest?” Sensing Erwin’s discomfort, Levi sighs and wraps Erwin in his arms, pressing light kisses to the hollow of Erwin’s throat with lips that have plumped, grown glossy.

“You wanted this,” he reminds Erwin, and Erwin sighs, threading fingers through Levi’s dark hair and cradling his head in the cup of his hand.

“You’re different,” Erwin mumbles, feathering kisses into the part of Levi’s hair. “I was expecting something else. I was expecting you’d want to have relations.” He finishes this part, delicately, mincing around the words even as Levi laughs breathlessly against the column of Erwin’s neck.

“Have relations,” he replies, his voice heavy with mirth. “I haven’t heard anything of the sort in centuries.” Just like that, Erwin finds the difference between him and Levi stretching out, the magnitude frightening in its intensity. “It’s just not my cup of tea, to use another figure of speech. Don’t worry, Father. I think you’ll find you can keep your vows relatively intact.”

Erwin breathes a mock sigh of relief. “I mean, if you’re gonna break promises, you might as well go all the way, huh?”

Levi giggles, his laughter like silver chimes.

*** 

Erwin is on the brink of sleep, exhausted from the day’s ordeals and his own physical exertions, when Levi rolls over to press a soft kiss against his mouth. This one isn’t claiming, isn’t feeding, isn’t hungry, and is instead composed of the gentle motions of a lover.

“Good night, Erwin.” Whispered against the swell of his lip.

“Good night, Levi.”

 ***

He sleeps through his alarm the next morning, and Levi does not wake him up. He slips out of bed, wraps himself in Erwin’s clerical robes, and all but skips to morning Mass to inform the parishioners that unfortunately their regularly attending priest is under the weather and that he will be more than happy to take over.

He reads the shaky sentences of Erwin’s sermon in a crystal clear voice that bounces liquid around the room, his voice high and his eyes bright.


	10. Acts

In exchange for the feedings, which start to take place more and more now that both of them have settled easy into the routine, Erwin begins to fire rapid questions at Levi, demanding answers that Levi has been previously loathe to give up. But now, with all but the renunciation of Erwin’s vows and the shameful secrets he carries like blemishes to the sermon, Levi cannot help but want to give back to the man who has given him so much.

“So, God’s real, then?” Erwin asks him one sticky night in the hazy heat of the summer, where they’re spread out on the mattress. Limbs brush against each other, almost too hot to bear, until they shift away again searching in vain for the cool patches that hide among the sheets.

“I thought you had faith, Father,” Levi mumbles, sleepily and long past the point of formality as he curls up a shell into the crumpled linen. Erwin traces the curve of his back hungrily, eyes searching out the places where the swollen lumps of his vertebrae had once risen from the skin in his abject hunger. They are no longer visible, save for smooth gentle swells that Erwin has to strain to make out, and Levi himself has become softer, as well. More rounded, more real. His face bears a soft curve to it now, a fullness in his cheeks, a brightness in his eyes, a gloss in his hair. His rosebud mouth, once pinched closed, blossoms against Erwin’s fingers and Erwin’s lips and Erwin’s skin.

Levi’s put on weight, and Erwin revels in every time Levi’s mouth hangs open in sweet surrender as he thrusts slow and steady into the cup of his own hand, knowing that the lascivious energies he puts into the task can be used to nourish and keep Levi at his side for as long as he possibly can.

“I do have faith,” Erwin says, hastily, but the words sound hollow even to his own ears. “I do,” he repeats, quieter this time, but even he can hear that it sounds as though he’s trying to convince himself than anything else.

“Hmm,” Levi exhales gently through his nose, kitten mouth opening in a yawn as he stretches loose limbed and languid. Erwin aches with the beauty of it all, his libido so long unused sparking even at the slightest temptations. Levi laughs, sensing it, but his mirth is giddy and breathless and innocent. “What’s that?” he asks, looking playfully over his shoulder, a grey eye peeking through the fall of hair. “I’m not hungry, Father.”

“No,” Erwin agrees, but his cock is already starting to stir between his thighs as his gaze travels down hungry to rest heated on the small of Levi’s back. “But I am. And you’re still far too thin.”

“No, I mean it,” Levi murmurs, his eyes focused, his tone sharper. Chastised, Erwin wilts, draws back. “I’m not like those other ones,” Levi mutters, relaxing back into the sheets with a wave towards the dusty books spinning cobwebs on the corner of Erwin’s desk. Erwin makes a mental note to return those to the clerical library as quickly as possible; there is no more information to be gleaned from them, or at least, none that he cares to read about.

“Tell me about Him,” Erwin urges, straining for anything to take his mind off the heat still layered beneath his skin like active wires. “What is He like? What is Heaven like? Why did you leave?” His inquiries come rapid fire, so quickly that Levi holds up a hand to stop him before he launches into a flurry of askance.

“One at a time,” Levi laughs, soft. “He’s exactly like what you’d expect. Kind and cruel in turns, but for the most part it’s a sort of laissez faire system up there. Over vast amounts of time, the smallest stream will carve away the largest mountain and all that.”

Erwin is almost crestfallen to hear this. “So there’s no sort of divine plan or anything?” he asks, lamely, disappointed. “We don’t have our own course?”

“Not that I know of,” Levi says with a shrug. He reaches up to wipe away a drop of sweat that’s winding its way over Erwin’s temple. “You do as you do.”

“And Heaven?” Erwin demands. “Is it everything the Bible says?”

Levi shrugs again. “It depends on your interpretation of the texts, I guess,” he replies, noncommittally. “For me, it was like hell, forgive the pun.” Erwin arches an eyebrow in askance at this, and Levi hastens to clarify. “Too many of the regrets I have from my mortal time are in Heaven, also, and when tasked to see all of them staring back at me isn’t exactly the most pleasant of experiences.”

“Is that why you left?” Erwin wants to know. For him, the idea is still unfathomable, someone willing to leave a describable paradise of contentment and relaxation where all would get their dues.

“Among others,” Levi agrees. “And you,” he gestures to Erwin, before waving his hand over their heads to indicate the vast sweep of humanity, “are supremely more interesting. So much unfulfilled potential just waiting to be discovered, for so many centuries.”

At the last part of the phrase, Erwin’s heart skips a beat.

“Centuries,” he muses, his voice trailing off as he considers the fact that Levi will most likely still be around long after he has already gone. An existence without Levi seems crushing, much in the same way that rescinding his faith would be. “Will you…” He takes a deep breath, pausing to consider and try to reword the question, far too much like a proposal and yet a far graver commitment. “Would you come back to Heaven with me? For me?”

Levi snorts, but Erwin can tell he’s pleased. The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles, genuinely, truly, and crows crowd in the thin skin, making tracks in the fine flesh. “You’re assuming you’ll get into Heaven,” he says, a gentle rebuke, as he lays his cool palm against Erwin’s burning chest. His pulse starts to race. “Do you think you deserve to? After what you’ve done? What we’ve done? Though it’s far too late for me; it’s a one-way ticket, you know, and I’ve kind of torn it up and tossed it away already.”

Erwin’s torn. He tries again, desperately. “I want to stay with you,” he says, bravely. Foolishly. “But I’ll only have a few more decades here. If I’m lucky.”

“You’re a lucky man, Father Smith,” Levi muses, tracing patterns and calligraphy into Erwin’s skin with the point of his fingertip. “Your decades will feel like centuries, and you’ll tire of me eventually.”

“Untrue,” Erwin counters, a tick of irritation making his eye twitch. “But you can’t expect me to give up everything my life has been headed towards. You can’t expect me to give up Heaven, for God’s sake!” After this exclamation, he wings a quick prayer of apology to wherever God is, in the hopes that he’ll forgive the transgression as well as all the other, more serious ones before it and the ones to come as well, just for good measure.

“And neither can you expect that of me,” Levi retorts smoothly. “Heaven wouldn’t take me back, anyway. Ink into water and all that stuff. The smallest drop would ruin an ocean.”

At a loss, Erwin falls back into the pillows, frowning up at the dark ceiling and listening to the cicadas hum outside. Levi falls silent as well, his breathing slow and controlled in a way that makes Erwin think he’s pretending. Acting at its finest. The line of discussion has been ended, abrupt and far too quick for his liking, and he wants to roll over and shake Levi out of his false stupor. He wants to make him understand, wants to make him need like he’s made Erwin need.

He lay by Levi’s side, quivering in anger at the injustice and the flares of desperation the last pure remnants of his soul sent up. The panic streaked across his vision as the world slipped into its summertime slumber, and in the darkness, Erwin whispered a prayer that was no longer selfless.

It would be the same prayer he would whisper for the rest of his nights on earth, a plea for them to never be separated, a sob for absolution, for the salvation he’d once so desperately craved and was now rescinding. It would be the same prayer that drummed its way through his dreams long after he’d hung up his clerical robes for the last time, long after he’d stepped out the archways of the chapel entrance on the last day.

Forgive me.


	11. Jude

Time sees Erwin on the wrong side of the confessional. He’s dressed in layman’s clothes, a casual black turtleneck thrown over dark jeans that Levi has professed to love over and over again, and he tries not to breathe too deeply. The inside of the confessional smells heavily of incense and the lingering, inexplicable sense of ash; the person before him must have been a chronic smoker, Erwin thinks to himself. The beads of his rosary click through his fingers as he worries it nervously between his hands, whispering prayers to himself while he waits for the priest to slide back the screen and step into the box.

Sunlight from the late afternoon dances through the slats in the lattice, painting over Erwin’s hands. The stained glass adds color and turns his skin into a kaleidoscopic whirlpool of color. It’s achingly beautiful, and not for the first time, he wonders if he is making the right choice.

The screen on the other side of the lattice slides open with a smooth schick, slides closed as the shadow of the priest falls over Erwin’s hands and takes away the color.

In a hesitant voice, so unlike him, he starts. “Hello, Father,” he intones softly. “It has been one week since my last confession.”

If the priest recognizes his voice, he doesn’t let on, and Erwin is grateful for this small allowance. He’d known how risky it was, the chances of getting caught much higher at St. Anne’s than any other chapel across the city. But no, it had to be here, Erwin thinks to himself, his rosary beads clicking together as he pulls them taut across his knuckles. It feels better to do it in person in the place where his transgressions have taken place, to confess face to face to those who have made him into a holy man and whose blessings he is now handing back.

His confession, prepared and agonized over for many long nights, sticks in his throat, now. Erwin finds that he cannot bring himself to say it.

“Go on,” the priest on the other side of the lattice encourages him, in a soft voice that Erwin isn’t quite sure he’s ever heard before. The priest’s voice is clear and high-pitched like a bell, a throaty timbre that makes Erwin think that he’s a new initiate, a new member of the clergy. How fitting, that he should come now to take Erwin’s place; the transition will go smoother than even he had hoped, and St. Anne’s will not be left wanting. “What weighs heavy on your mind, my son?”

In the end, Erwin makes up transgressions, yet another sin of falsehoods. He claims to have lied, to have committed adultery, and the priest says nothing. His silhouette sits straight-backed, hands folded primly in his lap, and Erwin’s not surprised. The sins are ones that are common enough, and in a way, he has committed these. He’s lied to those around him, who still see him as an agent of the Lord; he’s turned his back on faith and the institution that’s raised him.

And yet, paradox of paradoxes, Erwin can’t help but feel that his faith is stronger than ever before. He wants to grasp on to the wooden slats of the lattice, wants to shake it until the whole confessional box comes rattling down around them. God is real, he wants to shout until his voice echoes off the rafters and remains trapped in the recessed frescoes that line the ceiling. He’s real, He’s real, He’s real! Angels walk among us!

Yet Erwin says none of this.

“Are you repentant for your sins, my son?” the priest asks, calmly, and Erwin’s traitorous mind supplies him with No’s, strong negations all the way around. No, never, he’s not sorry and never will be, but he knows if he were to say that, the priest might sigh, might chuckle a little wistfully, and tell him that that’s simply the folly of man speaking and that he hasn’t attained that next level of redemption.

Erwin does not want to be redeemed, and so he says yes. He understands how tarnished he’s made his soul, he understands that the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the world cannot compare to the heavenly peace waiting for all the faithful.

No, they certainly cannot compare, not when the world and humanity holds interest and innovation beyond measure. Though Erwin hasn’t told Levi as such, he thinks he’s ready to understand, to let Levi open his eyes.

“I am,” he repeats, softly. “I’m so sorry, Father.” He hopes the tone of his voice is sorrowful enough.

The priest gives him his penance, absolves him of his sin, and Erwin steps out of the confessional, squinting in the brightly colored sunlight with a spring in his step and a newly cleansed soul.

* * *

 

Levi watches cross-legged on the bed as Erwin begins to pack. His flannel shirts and checked dress linens get pressed neatly, ironed and creased lovingly, before Erwin stacks them neatly in the bottom of a suitcase.

“What are you doing?” Levi asks, curiously, but his voice betrays him. He’s excited, and when Erwin glances over, he can see a brightness in Levi’s dark eyes, a happiness unlike one he’s ever seen. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m going with you,” Erwin says, the finality of his words surprising him even though they’ve been lodged in the forefront of his mind for weeks. He repeats them, just to make sure they feel as right on the tip of his tongue as they had the first time. “I’m going with you.”

Levi looks absolutely delighted. Patience pays off, easier than he had ever imagined, and he hops off the bed to help Erwin fold his clothes and place his books into boxes.

The room seems to empty itself around them, and when the last strip of masking tape is placed over the last cardboard flap, Levi nods his head in the direction of the patched wooden crucifix still hanging over the headboard of their bed. “Gonna take that with?” he asks, arching an eyebrow at Erwin.

Erwin walks over, his footsteps noiseless on the thick carpet as he reaches out to take it off the wall. The wood is worn smooth beneath his fingertips.

After a moment of long contemplation, he sighs and sets the crucifix on the desk.

“No,” he murmurs. “I have everything I need.”

Levi helps him carry his boxes of belongings outside, setting them down neatly on the grass while Erwin goes inside the main chapel to hand in his resignation.

“I’m in love,” Erwin says, no frills, no bells and whistles. The head priest looks him over somberly, taking in the neat press of his civilian clothes, the determination in a face still youthful, still unlined with worry. “I’m sorry.”

The priest accepts the neatly folded stack of clerical robes with a sigh, but Erwin doesn’t turn to look back as he spills out the cavernous doorways into a life all his own.


	12. Revelations

And so, like this, Erwin lives out the rest of his mortal years in an apartment on the south side of the city, waking up to the raucous crowing of seagulls outside his window and the murky overcast morning light spilling across one of Levi’s bare shoulders as he curls up next to Erwin in bed. Levi’s creamy skin, forever youthful, waxes and wanes between pleasingly soft and rounded with fat and periods of gaunt sharpness, where Erwin is too tired to give or Levi is too repulsed by the actions to accept. The pale milk of Levi’s flesh contrasts sharply with the sun-weathered, wrinkling skin that covers Erwin’s body, that starts to spot brown and sag in thin sheets when neither of them is looking. Crows tramp through the fine snow at the corners of his eyes, and laugh lines, signs of a life well lived, bracket his mouth like trenches that Levi traces his fingers through. Time carves rivers through his love, erodes it into layers that make it only all the more beautiful for its cracked purity.

Levi claims it only makes Erwin all the more endearing. Erwin covers the cracked mirrors in his tiny bathroom so as not to see.

Somehow, they putter by. The rent is paid, groceries appear, the radiator pops on in the coldest part of the night, and Erwin no longer tries to pretend that all of it isn’t part of Levi’s manipulations, tangled so thick around him like thorns to the rose.

“And how much of a sin can it be?” Levi asks, whenever Erwin frowns at him weakly and tells him that stealing is a sin, up on par with lying. “Temporary transgressions, for however long you decide to kick around for. They won’t be remembered.”

The way Levi says this makes Erwin feel guilty, feel forgotten, as though he himself might not be remembered, but Levi comforts him with kisses and washes away his insecurities with promises that, together, they will live forever.

The day comes when Erwin’s breath is drawn heavy into his lungs and expelled all too quickly, like it no longer wants to be a part of him. His heartbeat rattles frightened in his rib cage, terrified now that the final step, the inevitable conclusion of the decades, is soon upon him. He grasps blindly at straws, gnarled fingers flailing in the sheets as he reaches for Levi.

Levi’s cool hand presses gently atop his own, the skin smooth and firm. “Don’t be scared,” Levi whispers softly, his voice a soothing balm to Erwin’s fear. “You’ve been preparing for this all your life, sweetness.”

It is a period of scarcity, a period of famine, and Levi’s fingers are whittled to the bone. He’s refused to leave Erwin’s side, and for this small allowance, Erwin is unutterably grateful. Such pure selflessness, and Levi has been a better being than even Erwin can imagine.

His sight is the first to go, and the softly defined edges of his love quiver in and out of existence before flickering into milky ovals before fading into nothing at all. He tries to clutch at Levi’s fingers harder as he struggles to draw breath into his slowly failing lungs.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Levi whispers, voice crackling like the sound of autumn leaves. Warm dabs plip plop onto Erwin’s face, and he wonders for a moment if Levi is crying. The fingers of Levi’s free hand stroke through the fine strands of grey hair at his temples, a comfort. “It’s okay, it’s alright. You’ll do grandly.”

Erwin cannot feel Levi’s hand in his own any longer. The sensation of Levi’s thin lips pressing against his own leaches away.

Hearing disappears last, gradually, like voices down a tunnel, and Erwin tries desperately to cling futilely to the last vestiges of himself. “I love you,” Levi murmurs softly, his voice echoing around the seashell cave of Erwin’s ear, and Erwin slips away with the syllables still echoing around inside his head.

* * *

 

What feels like mere moments later, he finds himself being tugged upwards by a force that jerks him up like ropes. He turns his head, cranes his neck to look around, and finds his body lying still in repose on the apartment’s bed. Levi lays beside him, his eyes half-closed, a hand on Erwin’s chest, and from this angle, Erwin sees with a jolt of pity that Levi is far thinner than he had realized. Wispy, wraithlike, blurring at the edges until it seems like he’s about to fade away altogether. He opens his mouth to call for Levi, but a sudden great jerk pulls him upward, flickering through the cracking stucco ceiling, faster and faster until he can feel biting wind against his cheeks. Seagulls fly past him, around him, through him, crowing raucously, and the city is laid out below him like a puzzle board of all colors and shapes. Chinatown here, the Mission District there, but before he can begin to place a name to all the landmarks of his home, he’s being surrounded by a velvet darkness that falls over him like a comforting blanket. The warmth and the motion, gentler now, soothing now, rocks him to sleep.

* * *

 

He wakes up to find himself peering into a pair of bright blue eyes, their intensity dimmed only slightly by a pair of spectacles perched on the edge of a thin, pointed nose.

“Hello, Erwin,” the figure says, its eyes crinkling at the corners as it reaches out to help him up. A gentle cloudy whiteness surrounds them, stretching as far as Erwin can see. “I trust your journey was good?”

“It was,” he says, agreeably.

“A very long time to be gone from home, eighty-three years,” the figure muses. “But I am glad you enjoyed yourself. Would you like to come in, now?”

A door whose outline Erwin hadn’t spotted before swings open just to his right. Idyllic green meadows roll in gentle hills just beyond the frame, and Erwin can smell the soft scent of wildflowers. Butterflies frolic in gentle air currents that warm Erwin’s skin as it blows through the door.

He finds himself drawn to it, closer and closer and closer, his hand curling around the doorframe.

“Wait,” he murmurs, stopping in sudden realization. “Where’s Levi?”

The figure frowns slightly at him, a wrinkle of displeasure dancing across its face. “He cannot come with you,” it says, moving forward as though to nudge Erwin through the door.

“No.” Erwin shakes his head, prying his fingers away from where they’re curled tight around the doorjamb. “He has to come. I won’t go without him.”

The figure sighs in consternation. “You would rescind eternal happiness for this?”

“I would, for love,” Erwin says, bravely, and even as the words escape him, a soft sense of resolute tranquility flows through him, warming him from the inside out. “I’m sorry.”

“Go in peace, my child,” the figure murmurs, turning away from him already.

The door slips closed with a final click.

* * *

 

His hands are youthful, long and firm and slender, when he looks at them again. Erwin’s standing on the cracked stone steps leading up to the tiny apartment, craning his neck to look back up at the bedroom window where the drapes are tugged tightly closed.

The door, though locked, creaks open beneath his touch, and the old wooden stairs barely whisper beneath his footsteps.

Levi lies curled on the bed still, his eyes flickering rapidly beneath the fine skin of his eyelids. Erwin does not even deign himself a stare. The old, softly wasting figure in the bed is lost to him, now, and he only spares himself a mild glance of disgust before turning his full attention to Levi.

“Levi,” he whispers, his voice dry like autumn leaves. “It’s me.”

Levi’s eyes slip open, slow, muddled, soft, and he props himself up on one elbow to stare blearily at Erwin. A multitude of emotions shatters across his face: joy, sadness, love, anger, exasperation. Erwin cannot tell which one of all of these is the most compelling.

“You came back,” Levi says, but his voice is flat, unsurprised. “You utter fool.”

Erwin shrugs, letting the words roll off him easily and shatter on the floor. “I never got to tell you.”

“Tell me?” Levi arches a thin brow at Erwin, pinching his lips tight together. “Tell me what?” Levi slips off the bed gracefully, slinking towards Erwin, and Erwin winces in sympathy; as Levi slips in and out of the softly shadowed beams of light the chink in the drapes affords, he can see the bones outlined sharply beneath his skin.

“Tell you I love you,” Erwin murmurs, when Levi is only mere inches away. Levi’s eyes widen, and Erwin can’t help but bend down to return a kiss in full force, hungry, consuming.

Levi pulls away first, his stare caught somewhere between disbelief and tender amusement. “You fool,” he repeats, but it’s softer now, happy now. “You threw away eternity.”

“Trust me, I got it back in equal measure,” Erwin replies, smiling as he leans down to press another kiss to Levi’s mouth. “Are you hungry?”

Levi’s smile casts sunlight throughout the room. “For you? Always.”


End file.
